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Lawmakers nix review of Texas' plan to fix special education on last day to pass bills

Proponents of the review said parents should not have to wait until 2027 to see if the state is making progress on its plan. Lawmakers who cut the review said it was a matter of giving the state some time to implement its plan.

Joyce Pickering comments are projected on to a screen at a TEA hearing on special education curriculum at Monday, April 163, 2018. The hearing took place at the Region 10 Education Service Center in Richardson, Texas. She is Executive Director of Emerita and the former Executive Director of the Shelton School, a private school dedicated to children with learning differences. (Ron Baselice/The Dallas Morning News)(Ron Baselice / Staff Photographer)

Updated at 8:09 p.m.: Revised to include additional comments from Hinojosa's speech before the bill's passage in the House.

AUSTIN — A proposed review of Texas' strategic plan on special education, which has landed the state in hot water with the federal government for failing to properly identify and educate students with disabilities, won't happen because lawmakers nixed the idea on the last day to pass bills in the legislative session.

The investigation revealed that Texas had not provided kids with disabilities the services they needed to learn and violated federal law by failing to properly educate thousands of students. Some school administrators, the investigation found, refused to test students who may have had disabilities to see if they qualified for federally funded special education services.

In response, the Texas Education Agency held more than 100 focus groups and took thousands of responses from parents and advocates on how to revamp its special education programs. In March 2018, officials unveiled an early draft of a strategic plan. The agency had aimed to address the problems by this January but now has revised their target goal for having the issues addressed to June 2020.

In an attempt to provide a legislative benchmark, Reps. Morgan Meyer, R-Dallas, and Gina Hinojosa, D-Austin, tacked on an amendment to Senate Bill 619 that would require the state to investigate the agency's progress. The bill laid out what agencies would be inspected by the state's Sunset Advisory Commission, which periodically reviews state agencies for efficiency, over the next review period in 2021.

But a final version of the bill, presented Sunday, scraps that planned review.

Because the two chambers of the Legislature did not agree on a version of the bill, they had to appoint a 10-member conference committee made up of members of both chambers. The committee agreed to take out the review because they said a provision in the school finance bill, House Bill 3, includes a special education allotment advisory committee to study how to fund it.

Speaking before the bill's passage in the House late Sunday, Hinojosa said she was angry the provision had been taken out by the Senate.

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"The TEA is in the middle of a corrective plan but there’s no reason why we can’t have transparency about how that plan is laid out," she said. "I’m not quite clear why we stripped it. The reasons because of lawsuits or because there’s already a plan simply don’t make sense to me. Too many parents of kids in special education do not have confidence that our state is doing right by them and there is plenty of reasons why."

She pointed to the federal investigation by the Department of Education and new claims by advocates that Texas did not spend the appropriate funds on students with disabilities during fiscal year 2016-2017.

She also dismissed the idea that the Legislature' school finance bill was addressing the problem she was trying to tackle, saying the provisions in that bill only called for identifying funding for special education, not for identifying students that had possibly been left behind by the state.

"It's a cop-out to say we don't have to have sunset oversight over TEA's program," said Hinojosa, who was a school board trustee before joining the Legislature in 2017. "HB 3 doesn't have anything to do with how this state substantially ensures that we are providing the best possible education to our students in special education."

"The way we figure out how to provide the best education for these kids is to talk to the parents and teachers in the trenches. That's how the civil rights office of the Department of Education figured out we were not sufficiently identifying students for special education," she added. "A sunset review would have provided that opportunity for oversight and engagement during the interim, when we have more time."

The Texas Education Agency is not scheduled for a state review until 2027, and Hinojosa said parents of special education students should not have to wait that long to see if the state is making progress to help their children.

She said she would not ask any of her colleagues to vote against the bill, but did urge lawmakers to take action between now and the next session to ensure the education agency is making progress on fixing its education plan for students with disabilities.

Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-Granbury, the author of the bill and the chairman of the Sunset Advisory Commission, declined to comment. On Sunday afternoon, both chambers of the Legislature approved the bill without the requirement for the review.

Marshall Republican Rep. Chris Paddie, who sponsored the bill in the House, said lawmakers were concerned about the findings in the federal investigation but made a practical decision to not push for a review. He said they want to give the agency more time to implement its strategic plan before inspecting its progress.

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"It seemed like a better opportunity [to review] once they'd been given a chance to complete the work they're already doing," said Paddie, who is the vice chairman of the sunset commission.

Among the recommendations were to create a team to monitor some school districts on how they were educating kids with special needs and provide them assistance; help school districts train teachers on federal and state laws for educating kids with special needs; and require school districts to immediately start to identify students the state may have left out of special education to get them evaluated for federally funded services.

Paddie added that nothing prevents lawmakers from coming back in the next legislative session, in 2021, and calling for a review of the plan before 2027.

"We just wanted to give them an opportunity to complete the work they're already engaged in," he said. "It doesn't mean we don't care about the issue or don't want the challenges to be addressed."

James Barragán. James Barragán covers Texas politics for The Dallas Morning News. He has covered immigration, public safety and voting rights and has traveled on assignment to the U.S. Supreme Court and Houston during Hurricane Harvey. Before joining The News in 2017, he worked for the Austin American-Statesman and The Los Angeles Times.